Blawging our way to the front pages of Business Standard

SpicyIP is happy to announce to its readers that we’re ending the year on a happy note. The Business Standard one of India’s leading newspapers carried a front page report on how bloggers, like the SpicyIP Team, are driving India’s IPR agenda! The leading blogs mentioned in the report were SpicyIP, Feroze Ali’s pharmapatents.blogspot.com, Sandeep Rathod’s genericpharmaceuticals.blogspot.com & Varun Chhonker’s patentcircle.blogspot.com. The report goes on to say that the blogs are being recognized for “separating the wheat from the chaff in the flood of intellectual property related information.” As our readers must already know SpicyIP was started off by Shamnad as something to pass time but over the last years it has matured into a blog where “WE AIM TO INCREASE TRANSPARENCY IN INDIAN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY POLICY/INSTITUTIONS. WE ALSO STAND FOR FAIR, OBJECTIVE AND ACCURATE REPORTING/REVIEW OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND INNOVATION POLICY NEWS FROM INDIA.”

We would like to thank all our readers for their participation, encouragement and criticism. We only wish that there is much more participation in the blog from the readers. Please feel free to leave comments and stoke a debate on any of the topics that we write.

The Business Standard Report is as follows: (The only part of the report that caught me by complete surprise was that it seems to have merged Aysha’s location with my identity as a student!)

India’s IPR Regime

Joe C. Matthews,

New Delhi, 30^th November.

Early this year, Shamnad Basheer, a young intellectual property consultant, pointed out on his blog that a crucial paragraph in the report on patents by the RA Mashelkar panel was an exact copy of someone else’s research. This is what prompted the former director-general of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research to withdraw the report in February. Three months later, Basheer was at it again. As the government went into a tizzy over reports that some yoga postures had been patented in the US, he cleared the air by writing on his spicyipindia.blogspot.com that actually they were just some yoga accessories. These are just two instances of how bloggers are contributing to India’s transition to the new patent regime in which product patents are recognised as opposed to only process patents earlier. Basheer, Sandeep Rathod, Firoz Ali and Varun Chhonker are among those whose blogs are being recognised for separating the wheat from the chaff in the flood of intellectual property (IP)-related information. “In India IP is a recent trend. There isn’t enough affordable and readily available information,” Gopakumar Nair, a Mumbai-based patent expert, pointed out. Basheer began with sporadic posts. “It began as a time-pass in 2005. However, I found that there is a lot of interest in this area and this year I roped in three others as regular contributors to the blog,” said Basheer. Of the three, one is a legal consultant in New York, another a former journalist based in Paris and the third an Australian who focuses on global IP strategies. Basheer, who has also taken a law student from Chennai on board, claimed that his blog is a one-stop shop for IP information. Rathod, an IP professional attached to a global generic pharmaceutical company, draws hundreds of readers from across the IP space to his genericpharmaceuticals.blogspot.com. According to him, his posts, which are about international developments and their relevance to India, are attracting the attention of policy-makers, brokerage firms, IP professionals and patent attorneys. “The patent controller does not have to make public the decisions of the patents office. This is where I found my blog to be useful. Most of my entries are about pharmaceutical-specific patent information in the US, Europe and India,” Rathod said. He also distances himself from his employer. “I am not bothered about the effects on any particular sector.” For Chennai-based patent attorney Ali, pharmapatents.blogspot.com is a platform to explain the nuances of patent laws to the common man. “I give analyses of critical issues as and when they pop up.” The author of a book on Indian patent laws uses the blog to keep its readers updated on the changes in Indian IP laws. At least 500 readers flock everyday to patentcircle.blogspot.com to read the musings of Chhonker, a young IP consultant who specialises in IP litigation. “I began blogging after I found that blogs in the US play a crucial role in understanding patent laws. Patent attorneys there discuss cases threadbare on the blogs and are even read by judges,” he said.